


Better Half

by dedicatedfollower467



Series: Better Half verse [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Brainwashing, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 08:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1462729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dedicatedfollower467/pseuds/dedicatedfollower467
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier daemon AU. Pretty much all you need to know. Hints of Steve/Bucky.</p><p>SPOILERS for The Winter Soldier. I would think this would be obvious, but I'll make it clear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Half

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky's daemon, Frankie is an [American Pit Bull Terrier. ](http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/terezie/terezie1012/terezie101200050/8506657-black-and-white-american-pitbull-terrier.jpg)
> 
> Steve's demon Saorise is a [Rocky Mountain Goat. ](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Mountain_Goat_Mount_Massive.JPG)
> 
> (Saorise is pronounced Seer-sha)

Natasha had said she never saw his daemon, wasn’t even sure if he had one. The story only made him seem even more ghostlike and insubstantial – a man with a metal arm and no daemon, relentless, ruthless, deadly.

And he had been, brutal and dangerous and shadowy, and conspicuously lacking a daemon. Steve and Saoirse had both nearly recoiled at the man’s lack of a soul. They can both believe that a man with no soul could be that bereft of empathy, and they feel no guilt at defending themselves by whatever means necessary.

And then the mask falls off.

Steve sees the nose and chin, calls out “Bucky?” to him, unsure. The confused look he gets back, the shout of “Who the hell is Bucky?”  are enough to throw him off, to make him wonder if he missed his best friend so much that he’s started seeing his eyes in the faces of strangers.

But then a dog rushes up to his side, skidding to a halt and snarling at them. Her entire body is crisscrossed with white scars that stand out against her black fur, her ears are gone, and her left front leg has been replaced with a warped metal claw. Still, they’d recognize that daemon anywhere.

“Frankie,” Saiorse breathes, and the dog daemon stops snarling long enough to cock her head in confusion, apparently having heard her all the way over there.

They don’t get long to confirm their suspicions, for man and daemon disappear too quickly to be believed, but they knew them.

* * *

They knew them.

At first he attributes it to a sense of déjà vu – his name isn’t Bucky and her name isn’t Frankie (they have no names, they are nameless, he is not a person and she is not a daemon, they are two parts of a sophisticated weapon, objects, things, what they are called is a description, not a name) but there had been something about that blond hair and the thick white wool which struck some ancient, long-forgotten chord and resonated throughout his body.

He hadn’t really needed to voice his suspicions to the daemon by his side (he cannot think of her as his daemon, because she does not belong to him any more than he belongs to her, they both belong to Hydra) but he does anyway, travelling back from the mission, the two of them alone.

“Did they seem familiar to you?” he says.

The dog daemon startles and looks up at him. They rarely speak to each other (they rarely see each other, are rarely let out alone together, are never allowed to touch, but since they are things and not people it does not matter that they do not get that contact) and so he is not surprised that she is surprised.

But she considers his question with her head cocked, the stubby flaps of skin that are the only thing left of her mutilated ears perking up slightly.

“Yes,” she says. “The goat. I thought I knew her. And the man.”

“Yes,” he says. “The man.”

* * *

The man had been Bucky. Steve and Saoirse are sure of it.

Neither of them can figure out how they feel about it, though. As soon as they have the chance to gather themselves, just a moment of relaxation and preparation, they find a quiet place and Steve lays down with his head pillowed on Saoirse’s body. The last time they’d lain like this, Bucky and Frankie had been lying next to them, his head pillowed on her body in exactly the same way.

“I can hardly believe that man is Bucky. Did you see his arm?” Steve says quietly.

“I saw,” Saoirse says. “Did you see Frankie’s scars?”

Steve winces. “Like she’d been fighting,” he whispers.

“I know,” she whispers back, her beard brushing his ear.

He sighs, deep and heavy. “I can’t fight them,” he whispers. “It’s like he’s a part of me.”

He feels her nod behind him. “As if the two of them were also bound to us like daemons.”

Steve closes his eyes. “We’re going to have to fight them, though. Because if we don’t, they’ll kill us.”

“I know.”

* * *

“I know,” he says. “I knew them.”

The dog sitting alert on the table beside them has a slack look on her face, which might mirror his own or he might be mirroring (there is no room inside them for anything other than blankness, the vacuum fills them up completely, their emptiness consumes them) but either way he feels like there is a question that must be answered. But he doesn’t know what the question is.

He hears the words that the man speaks to him (the man who controls him, who has the power of containment and freedom, of life and death, the one who points him at the target and pulls the trigger) but they don’t really register. The sensation of familiarity is more important.

“But we knew them,” he repeats, only vaguely aware that he has switched from the singular to the plural (he is not a part of her, she is not a part of him, they are both part of Hydra, they are weapons and nothing more) because he is far more concerned with the image of a blond man and a white goat streaked with muck and why they will not leave his mind.

The slap lands without meaning on his face, because while it hurts it only registers as something too far away to matter, the pain melting into the ubiquitous, constant ache from his arm. Still he does not register the words because that man... that daemon…

When next he registers information, he becomes aware that they are going to wipe him and the dog daemon. On some level he is knows that he is having his mind wiped (lost information, missing chunks of his brain that reel around in the rotting hollow his skull,  banging into things and occasionally creating perturbing sparks that should not exist) but it has been a long time since he resisted. In some ways, returning to factory conditions is a relief, and he takes the mouth guard willingly when a hand inserts it into his mouth.

The pain explodes across his head, but he can’t bring himself to care.

* * *

The pain explodes across his head, but he can’t bring himself to care. Because if Bucky is doing this to him, he can’t find it in himself to resist.

There were moments in the battle where Steve felt like fighting back, but now his work has been done he is done fighting. He won’t hurt Bucky, and Saoirse won’t hurt Frankie.

It doesn’t matter that Frankie has sunk her teeth into Saoirse’s throat, that Saoirse is dripping red blood against her white wool, that one of her legs has given out underneath her. It doesn’t matter that Steve’s lip is split, that he’s been shot in three different places, that Bucky’s metal fist comes down again to snap his head back and make him bleed.

“I’m with you ‘til the end of the line,” he promises Bucky, his brother, his other half, his soulmate. The world is going red and black and fading.

Saoirse is crying out beside him, “Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie,” the name becoming a litany and a prayer, made holy by desperation and love. Frankie growls and sinks her teeth more deeply into Saoirse’s throat.

And then they are falling, falling together. He closes his eyes.

* * *

He closes his eyes, grabs his daemon, and falls.

The dog struggles for a moment in his arms (contact, actual physical contact, he has not touched her in living memory, he has not touched her in eons, he has never touched her, and yet the touch is familiar and warm and easy to sink into) although she goes quiet a moment later, leaning into the shell of his body.

He doesn’t know whether they are falling or diving, but they are chasing a memory, a half-remembered dream, following them into the waters below. The possibility that they might die occurs to him, but his own death, or even the death of the daemon ( _his_ daemon, he knows now, his own, his very own, and he claims her with his arms), but the thought that the man with the blond hair and the woolly goat daemon ( _Steve_ , one of the rotten fragments of his mind supplies, _Saoirse_ ) might die is anathema to him.

He will not allow it to occur.

They plunge into the icy water and his daemon breaks free and starts paddling after the goat, whose wool is waterlogged and beginning to drag her down.

The man’s clothing is also waterlogged, threatening to drag him down, and he reaches out an arm, clenches the man’s shoulder and yanks him up. With a hard kick through the water, he starts dragging the man towards shore. It is a long way away but he will not give up until the man and the goat daemon are safely on the ground.

When he reaches the dog and the goat paddling through the water (his daemon’s teeth are once again gripped tight in the wool of the other daemon, but gentle this time, not to hurt, but to save) he breaks a taboo that he has long been used to ignoring but that the new fragments of memory swirling through his brain prohibit even now.

But if the man’s daemon dies, so will the man (for the longest time he thought it was not true for him, for the dog and he did not share each other, were not bound, but now he knows it is a lie and when she is cut he bleeds) and the man must not be allowed to die. So with one had he holds the man, and with the other he holds the daemon, feeling the tingling sensation in his arm in a way he hasn’t for ages.

They make it to shore. He drags them there, the man and the daemon, and watches as they curl instinctively around each other.

His own daemon butts her head tentatively against his leg, as though unsure if she is allowed to do that now. He rests a hand on her head in acceptance.

“What are we going to do now?” she whispers.

He stares off into the city before them. “We’re going to find out who Bucky is,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> I have to admit I am seriously considering making this part of a series but I need to finish my other WIP fics before this gets done.
> 
> To anyone who has been reading Every War is Both Won and Lost, (or even, god forbid, Sing Softly to My Soul) I'm very sorry this isn't a chapter for one of those. I just got bit by the fic bug and had to write it.


End file.
